Jennifer Harms was married to the love of her life for 23 years. Then she asked him for a divorce.
Her multiple sclerosis had put her in a wheelchair. Her eyes had blurred, her memory faded.
Monthly bills in the thousands made her fear her husband, a farmer, would go broke. To get Medicaid, she says, they had to divorce.
“I really hated to bow out. … I told him, ‘You’ve got to go on and live your life.’”
She’s in her room at Milder Manor, a nursing home in Lincoln. She’s 47. Her hair is dark, her skin smooth and tan. She’s surrounded by people much older, like the roommate beyond the blue curtain who’s sleeping now, a little after lunch.
Jennifer says her great joy, besides the Lord, is her computer. She plays solitaire on it. She makes inspirational greeting cards and prints them off for friends, her sisters, her brother, the nurses, the other residents.
People are also reading…
She put a basket of flowers on a card for Peg and Matt, her sister and nephew, thanking them for visiting:
God knew what he was doing. (Open the card) When he made us family.
Sundays, the church van comes.
Jennifer is bored a lot, but not alone. The Lord brings people into her life, like her ex-husband and his new wife, who visit once a week. Like Susan, the volunteer who reads to her from the Bible. Like Kathy and the other nurses.
She can use her arms, but she feels nothing from the waist down. She asks God to stop the disease from progressing.
She feels the Holy Spirit with her. She didn’t used to feel it, she says.
Before MS hit her when she was 20, she was a typical kid. She drank on weekends with the popular kids of Ord, but she was a good kid.
She was a cheerleader, a captain of the drill team, a lifeguard.
Gosh, she says, she loved to swim. She was in the public pool every day in the summer. She won ribbons. She had long, strong legs. Her dad told her she moved through the water so fast, like a pencil.
She went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.
A photo of that young woman smiles down from a shelf above her hospital bed. A gorgeous girl with a tan.
“Did you turn heads?”
She laughs.
“Yes, I did.”
When she was 20, her legs grew numb. A doctor diagnosed the MS. The next summer, she jumped in the water and sank. She couldn’t even tread water. Some days, she couldn’t get out of bed. She got mad at God.
How could you let me be in this position?
She improved, and convinced herself for a while that she didn’t have MS, that she’d been misdiagnosed. In 1980, she met the love of her life at a church barbeque. He was tall, blond and handsome, and she was blown away. He was a Christian. He led her to the Lord.
Now, she says, maybe she’s bringing others to the Lord.
Like her dad. Since her mom died a few years ago, they’ve grown extremely close. He didn’t used to be close to the Lord, she says, or to her when she was growing up.
Like the physical therapists.
“When I go to physical therapy and stuff and they say, ‘Well, Jenny, why haven’t you given up?’ And I say, ‘Well, I’m doing it for the Lord. I know he’ll help me, and he’ll do what he can for me on Earth.’”
In heaven, she will ask the Lord for children, three of them. She will ask Him to let her swim again. And she will thank Him for all the love in her life, especially His.
Colleen Kenney is on leave. Reach her editors at 473-7306 or citydesk@journalstar.com.
